Anne-Marie Duff on love, London and quantum mechanics

In the FT's new 'Stage Door' series, the actress talks about her starring role in 'Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle', a play by Simon Stephens that tackles love, London and human lessons from quantum mechanics

Produced by Griselda Murray Brown and Natalie Whittle. Filmed by Richard Topping. Edited by Oliver McGuirk.

Transcript

Heisenberg, The Uncertainty Principle is a play about two people, the way that they play with the space between each other, and what it means to really connect with somebody. And sometimes, it can take us by surprise.

The play itself deals with lots of different kinds of uncertainties, I guess-- the uncertainty of what happens next, the uncertainty of whether somebody will be there for you, fear that's born out of uncertainty and what we do with that fear, how it makes us behave, how it makes us treat each other, our relationship to experiences that we've had, and how other people's versions of the past can differ greatly from ours.

I play a character called Georgie Burns. She's kind of extraordinary. She's like a sort of hummingbird. She still has to function in the world, and her way of functioning isn't necessarily terribly healthy, and it isn't what we'd expect from a woman in her 40s. She's also an American. She's from another place, but she finds her home here. She's just sort of on this strange quest to root herself, and she looks outside of herself for those kinds of affirmation.

Simon Stephens is very, very brilliant at explaining the Heisenberg principle in relation to human experience. We can be so busy focused on the expectations we have of a relationship that we stop looking at the other person, and that's what's so clever about his writing. He makes it completely relative. So for the audience, they say, oh, I completely understand. It's existentialist. It's about just being alive and how we cope with that.

We also have been really, really lucky to work with Steven Hoggett on lots of movement inside of the play. That was a real challenge, too, because we were having to come up with a lot of physical language. It was physically similar to Simon Stephens' dialogue, the way he uses very short phrases or hugely long sentences.

The uncertainty principle is a source of light, and then it would be shown through tiny partitions. What would happen to the light one way when people were focusing on the source of light, a certain thing would happen. But then, when they were focusing on what happened to the light, it changed. And nobody can quite pinpoint why that would happen.

He suggests that fate is self-determining or whatever the word is. You create your own path and how just a moment with somebody completely affects the rest of your life. And I just think it's so powerful, isn't it?